I’ve gone a bit missing in action since I started my part-time job, while still doing all the other things I need and want to be doing (translating, editing, hip-hopping, Korean lessons plus lots of admin). Not that I actually work very long hours… but I’m just exhausted when I’m not working, and this has had an impact even on my reading, but especially on my reviewing. I was also laid low by the flu for a few days, and I just slept most of the time instead of reading. I don’t think I’ll do a lot more reading over the next few days, so let me write the wrap-up post now instead of my usual Friday Fun.
Eight books which took me to a total of six countries (or even seven, depending on how we count the travelling undertaken in Elinor Glyn’s novel). China and the UK were represented by two books each, then one each set in Romania, Germany (Berlin) and South Korea, and then finally Three Weeks which describes a young Englishman touring Switzerland and Italy. Only three of the books were in translation though, because the Romanian author Sophie Van Llewyn wrote Bottled Goods in English. The Russian author Kamier wrote Russian Disco in German but I actually read it in English translation (having bought it long before I moved to Berlin).
Hugh Battye’s book A Tale of Two Chinas is non-fiction and based on the author’s many years spent in China, first learning the language and then completing his Ph.D. on ethnic and religious minorities there. The two Chinas he talks about is the urban vs. rural divide, and it was full of fascinating and detailed information that was entirely new to me, but also quite humorous and easy to read.
I’d read and enjoyed novels by Shin Kyung-Sook, but this one entitled The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness is pretty much a memoir (perhaps with a little poetic licence), about young people moving from the countryside to work in factories in Seoul and attending night schools in the 1970s and 80s against a complicated totalitarian political backdrop. The author (or her alter ego) keeps asking herself throughout why she finds it so difficult to write about that period and why she has almost wilfully forgotten her colleagues from that time. The answer, of course, is that it was too traumatic.
But if I thought that was depressing, then Red Sorghum by Mo Yan definitely trumped it. No amount of lyrical descriptions of the sorghum fields in all seasons could make up for the sheer brutality (against the oppressive Japanese forces, against other fighting factions, against neighbours, against animals) described in stomach-churning detail. There was a stench of blood on every page almost.
I read Big Ben Strikes Eleven intermittently while I was ill and, although it started off well enough, and I had high hopes of it becoming very political, it became a little too bogged down in family relationships and budding love stories and alibis. But it’s interesting that David Magarshack turned his hand to fiction as well.
Wladimir Kaminer left Russia for Berlin in 1990, when it was still possibly to leave the Soviet Union to go to GDR and then, upon unification of the two Germanys, remain there forever. The book Russian Disco includes a little bit of autobiographical detail, but it is in fact a collection of vignettes about his life and that of his friends in Berlin, from Russian-speaking and other communities. There are some witty observations, but I didn’t find it as funny as some others described him (comparing him to David Sedaris), and some of his stories fell completely flat.
Bottled Goods is a novella in flash about a marriage and a family that is torn apart by the secret services in Romania, when one of their relatives defects to the West. I liked the way the story was not always told directly, but from multiple perspectives, in different styles, in little vignettes. And, compared to the Asian books, it wasn’t quite as harrowing, although it certainly isn’t light-hearted.
After all the trauma books, I wanted something very different and silly. I can’t remember who recommended Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks, or maybe I just impulse bought it in a second-hand bookshop, but it was a scandal when it was published in 1906 for its frank portrayal of sex without marriage. That may be the case for the English-speaking world, but to be honest, I think the French and the Austrians had written far worse by then. A naive young Englishman is sent off to Europe to get over his desire to wed the local squire’s daughter, and promptly gets besotted by a mysterious older woman. They spend a total of three weeks together, but apparently it completely changes him – and he suddenly matures and becomes subtle and all. Because, you see, it was not just lust, but he was also really taken by her mind (and they both have no money worries, so they can recreate all sorts of romantic scenarios in mountain cabins in Switzerland and palazzos in Venice). It was sickly sweet and needlessly melodramatic, and not very raunchy at all, with high-falutin’ speeches that made me laugh.
The best book of the month was A Working Mother by Agnes Owens. I knew I had it on my shelves when I read Jacqui’s excellent review of it, so I searched for it and read it in pretty much one day. It’s so deadpan and clever, yet also quite heartbreaking. As Jacqui says, it has something of Muriel Spark or Beryl Bainbridge about it, with a dark underbelly but a deft and light touch.
It has been a quieter month in terms of events as well. I had a nice day out on the 1st of May and did a guided tour of the notorious Kreuzberg neighbourhood at the start of the month. I saw an exhibition about the Bauhaus women photographers. I took part in a literature get-together organised by Lettretage, where I met a lot of budding and established writers, translators and event organisers – hugely enjoyable to talk about books and creativity once more! And then last Sunday I watched the Carnival of the Cultures parade – Brazil being the great mood-maker, as usual. I only found later on, sadly, that a Korean friend had prepared a T shirt for me to join the parade, but I’m not sure I could have lasted the whole route in the blazing sun.
I also watched and even rewatched some good films and series this month, six of them, which took me to a total of four countries. The rewatched ones were even better than I remembered. First of all, the Japanese TV series Long Vacation from 1996, which had all of us Japanese students drooling over Kimutaku, but is also an excellent depiction of those years when the Japanese economic bubble burst (and we were all a mess in Romania as well). Paprika remains utterly crazy and fun, but also sad and anxiety-inducing, with beautiful imagery and saturated colour. I also watched two films about people working behind the scenes in stores, a world I now know from my own experience. The German In the Aisles with Sandra Huller and Franz Rogowski felt much more realistic than the Korean Pavane. The Frog and the Water was the only one I saw in the cinema this month, a film that was trying perhaps too hard to say something about how we treat people with Down’s syndrome, but it did have its moving moments, although it occasionally descended into farce and a sheer unbelievable ending. Finally, Innocents with Dirty Hands is a film in which Claude Chabrol seems to mock his own film style – over the top, camp, with too many twists and turns. But Romy Schneider is luminous, so I awarded an extra half-star for her alone.
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